What is the significance of this year's topic?

Who is Dr. Oliver Sacks?

How is Dr. Sacks's address linked to the Honors Institute?

What will happen at the Institute Symposium?

How does the Honors Institute affect the Miami Valley?

What is the location and date of Dr. Sacks's keynote address?

What is the location and date of the Honors Institute Symposium?

What is the Honors Institute?

The Honors Institute is a hybrid, multi-track learning experience that culminates in a provocative community event. Its purpose is to prepare Honors students to think beyond their academic training and to make it a habit of incorporating this training into larger, humanistic considerations of the common good. Focusing each year on a different contemporary intellectual issue of ethical importance, the Institute consists of:

• two interdisciplinary seminars for WSU Honors Program students on the Honors Institute's annual topic.
• a service learning project for students to work with community organizations on projects related to the annual Honors Institute topic.
• a keynote address, free and open to the public, delivered by a figure of national prominence.
• a day-long symposium, free and open to the public, consisting of small, intensive discussion sessions run by regional experts and humanities scholars.
  

What is the significance of this year's topic?

In recent decades, the traditional idea of a self, a mind, or a soul has been challenged by developments in neuroscience. According to neuroscience proponents, the mind is nothing more than the activity of the brain understood in terms of its information-processing activities. But do these recent developments give us the last word on our sense of ourselves as conscious creatures? Honors Institute participants will be invited to engage in questions that arise from new research into the human brain. These questions include:

• What does it mean to equate moods, emotions, thoughts, and convictions with the mechanical activity of neurons in specific regions of the brain?
• What does such an equation have to say about the latitude for and definition of human self-determination, creativity, and freedom?
• How does this new approach to human consciousness change our conception of the roles that history, memory, imagination, the unconscious, the soul, and the question of God play in the human search for meaning?
• How has it changed traditional questions concerning the meaning of human life?
• Is there a significant difference between the female and male brain?
• How does this new approach to consciousness change or renew our sense of moral responsibility?
• What is the relationship between the psychical and the physical?

Who is Dr. Oliver Sacks?

Perhaps best known for his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Dr. Sacks is concerned above all with the ways in which individuals survive and adapt to different neurological diseases and conditions. Equally interested in diseases and people, theory and drama, science and romance, Dr. Sacks has made it his task to "restore the human subject at the centre -- the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject. . . . ." His best-selling books, widely used in university humanities courses, have served as the inspiration for artists working in forms as varied as poetry, essay, documentary, drama, painting, dance, cinema and fiction. His book Awakenings (1973) became a play and later a movie by the same name (1990), starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. 

How is Dr. Sacks's address linked to the Honors Institute?

The Institute Address is the keynote event for the Institute Symposium. In his March 9 address, Dr. Sacks will consider the elusive act of creativity and the ways it can be nurtured. Creativity involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind -- with a critical inner eye. Creativity has to do with the inner life -- with the flow of new ideas and strong feelings.

What will happen at the Institute Symposium?

The Institute Symposium on March 10, 2006, is free and open to the public. It will further explore the theme of creativity and the brain in three separate, complementary tracks of inquiry: liberal arts, performing arts, and the medical perspective. Regional scholars and community representatives will make presentations on topics such as gender and the brain, the creative impulse, and the meaning of consciousness. Community organizations will also offer informational tables and sessions throughout the day. The symposium will begin with an opening continental breakfast, proceed to concurrent sessions, followed by lunch for all participants, and another session of concurrent workshops. Online registration for the symposium will be available starting in early January 2006.

How does the Honors Institute affect the Miami Valley?

The Wright State University Honors Institute was created to respond to a number of needs, the most salient being the importance of producing graduates who are creatively and civically engaged in their community -- who exercise what philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls a "civic imagination." The population of Dayton has declined steadily in recent years, most notably since 2000. Ohio overall has had difficulty retaining college-educated citizens and is lagging behind the nation in what is now referred to as a "knowledge economy." Unlike Ohio's former manufacturing economy, the "knowledge economy" requires a highly educated, well-rounded, and community-focused citizenry. According to Richard Florida, whose book The Rise of the Creative Class has influenced urban planning all over the nation (most locally in Dayton's Tech Town run by Citywide Development Corporation), "the key to regional growth lies not in reducing the costs of doing business but in endowments of highly educated and productive people." It is in this context that the WSU Honors Program has decided to inaugurate the Honors Institute.

What is the location and date of Dr. Sacks's keynote address?

Dr. Sacks's keynote address will be held on Thursday, March, 9, 2006, at 7:00 p.m. in the Apollo Room of the Student Union on the Wright State University Main campus in Dayton, Ohio. No ticket is required for Dr. Sacks's address.

What is the location and date of the Honors Institute Symposium?

The Honors Institute Symposium will be held on Friday, March, 10, 2006, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the WSU Student Union. Lunch will be provided.